AIIA wheels out cloud big guns

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 08 February 2012 09:26

Australia's peak ICT industry body is bringing Vivek Kundra, the former White House CIO and author of the Obama government's Cloud First policy to inject some 'fact' into the debate surround cloud uptake. Today of course Mr Kundra is an executive vice president with Salesforce.com - a company with a vested interest in talking up the cloud.

According to Suzanne Campbell, the chief executive officer of the Australian Information Industry Association, the AIIA's Cloud Strategy Summit which will be held in Canberra on 15 February will allow a 'Fact based conversation on the cloud' which will cover off issues such as security, privacy and the ramifications of international legislation such as the US Patriot Act on Australian data held in offshore clouds.

She said that there had been a 'lack of clarity' in much of the discussion about cloud computing in the past.

The event, which kicks off with an opening address from the minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, will also see the release of preliminary findings from a survey conducted by KPMG.

This is intended to probe the economic and productivity benefits that might be expected from cloud computing. Ms Campbell said that she hoped the survey would highlight; 'The prospect of productivity uplifts associated with the cloud and that leads to important considerations re our GDP. It's no trivial matter.'

For many organisations data sovereignty is also no trivial matter, with many organisations concerned about, or barred by legislation from, sending their data offshore. The challenge according to Ms Campbell was about navigating between; 'National sovereignty and technical reality.'